Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday March 01, 2014 @06:39AM
from the y'canna-take-our-laaaaandform dept.

00_NOP writes "The political battle over Scotland's independence ballot — to take place in September this year — has now moved on to how the BBC project the UK on their national weather forecast. The BBC use a projection based on the view of Britain from geostationary weather satellites and so there is naturally some foreshortening at the northern end of Britain (Scotland, in other words). But nationalist campaigners say this means Scottish viewers are constantly being shown a distorted image of their country which makes it look smaller and hence (in their view) less able to support independence. In response others have suggested that the nationalists are truly 'flat earthers.'"

Yes, they changed the projection in around 2005. The new format did indeed suck - take a look at the 'this is how weather maps look now' image on this page [bbc.co.uk]. It was a triumph of 3D prettiness over usability and produced wonderfully unhelpful graphics like this [flickr.com] and there was a lot of sulking over it, not so much because of nationalist fervour, but more because it was crap. The BBC themselves claim they had 16,000 complaints [bbc.co.uk]. So they tweaked it, significantly [bbc.co.uk].

It's a shame that the BBC's obsession with shiny things produced a weather forecast that sucked, and it is indeed quite possible that they didn't recognise how much it sucked because of inner-M25 London myopia, although if so the joke's on them because a significant proportion of BBC staff were moved to Manchester fairly shortly thereafter. Since the BBC produces a lot of things that are shiny but happen to suck it doesn't seem necessary to attribute the weather forecast to a subconscious urge to portray Scotland as negligible. Occam's razor suggests that the simpler explanation might be that whoever outsourced the weather forecasting isn't half as smart as they think they are.

Although probably economically beneficial to Scotland, most people want independence for moral reasons.

Oh, has the referendum happened? I thought it was due in September.

Or are we talking only about those (in Scotland) who so far have expressed a preference for independence. Although substantial, I don't believe this is (yet) a majority of those eligible to vote. And we won't know for certain until September.

As to "Successive Tory governments", from 1997 to 2010 we (the UK - I'm rUK) had a Labour government, with two Scottish Chancellors (Brown and Darling), a Scottish Prime Minister (Brown) and a Prime Minister, who if not Scottish, was educated at one of Scotland's top Public Schools (Blair, went to Fettes, in Edinburgh).

More likely the (Spanish) EU commission president would look very unfavourably on Scottish membership, considering the boost that would give to the independence ambitions of Catalunya and the Basque country. And would it stop there? What about Sicily, Lombardy, Bavaria...? That's the thinking behind the reluctance to see the UK divided within the EU.